Children of the Sea 01 - Sea Witch

is still alive.”
     
    More alive than anyone he’d ever known. She burned with life like a fever. Even her body temperature was hot.
     
    Caleb cleared his throat. “Yeah.”
     
    “She talking yet?”
     
    “Nope.”
     
    “She’s not a fugitive, is she?”
     
    It was a reasonable question. Caleb had asked himself the same thing. “Not according to NCIC. Her fingerprints don’t match anything on file.”
     
    “So, no criminal history. You check Missing Persons?”
     
    “I’m telling you, she’s not in the database. There’s a sixteen-year-old girl went missing downstate twenty years ago, no fingerprints on record.
    But the profile doesn’t match—wrong age, wrong eye color.”
     
    “You could put out a press release,” Reynolds suggested. “Appeal to the public. You know, ‘Police seek help identifying beautiful naked woman,’ that kind of thing. You’d get a lot of responses.”
     
    “From every crackpot and crazy within five hundred miles. No, thanks.”
     
    “How do you know she’s not crazy?”
     
    Tension lodged at the base of Caleb’s skull. He massaged the back of his neck with one hand, holding the phone in the other. “She’s not.”
     
    “Just forgetful,” Reynolds said dryly.
     
    157
    “She has a concussion.”
     
    “She bumped her head. Doesn’t mean she’s telling you the truth.”
     
    Suspicious bastard.
     
    But he was right. Caleb didn’t know what troubled him more—that Maggie could be lying to him or that he wanted so desperately to believe in her.
     
    “I’m trying to talk her into seeing a neurologist on the mainland. Get a CT scan, do some memory retrieval techniques, ” he said.
     
    “Right,” Reynolds said. “Pump her with enough amobarbital, she might relax enough to answer a few questions. ”
     
    “I was thinking hypnosis.”
     
    “Sure. If you want the DA to throw out her account in court.”
     
    Caleb’s jaw tightened until his back teeth ground together. “You got any better ideas?”
     
    “Not really. Have you considered maybe your Jane Doe—”
     
    “Her name is Maggie.”
     
    “Right. Have you considered maybe she doesn’t want to be identified?”
     
    “Hiding from somebody.”
     
    “That, or somebody’s already caught up with her, and she’s protecting him.”
     
    Caleb had considered that, all right. Maggie was living with him.
    Sleeping with him. He knew she liked her coffee sweet and her sex fast and rough. But how well did he really know her ?
     
    He had a sudden, vivid memory of Maggie smiling and playing with the cat under the table. “ It suffers me to touch it, to pet it . But they do not own the cat .” Her gaze met his. “ Any more than you would own me if I choose to stay with you. ”
     
    158
    “Just see what you can do to move things along on your end,” he told Reynolds.
     
    And he would do the same, Caleb thought, hanging up the phone.
     
    Maybe Maggie didn’t want to remember. That’s what amnesia was all about, wasn’t it? The mind protecting itself against things too terrible to recall.
     
    He pushed away the memories of Iraq, of Jackson’s boot, of Danny’s face . . .
     
    Hell, he’d like nothing better than to forget himself.
     
    As long as Caleb was prepared to ignore his job, forget his responsibilities, he could play house and pretend. Pretend that his leg wasn’t held together with screws and scar tissue, that he didn’t withdraw into his work as surely as his old man had retreated into a bottle. Pretend Maggie was free to be with him, in his house. In his bed.
     
    It wasn’t just that she was available for sex. He’d had that with Sherilee, at least in the beginning.
     
    Maggie enjoyed life. She savored every meal, every morning, every shift in the weather.
     
    And sex. God, she loved sex. The things she did with her hands and with her mouth . . . Those noises she made in the back of her throat, like she loved what she was doing . . . what he was doing . . .
     
    Yeah. That was different. She was different.
     
    She never complained. Not about her head or her feet, the trauma of the attack or the strain of her new job. Not about the odd gaps in her knowledge that made Caleb wonder if her assailant had hit her a little bit too hard. Not about his scars or his nightmares or his lack of progress on her case.
     
    Maybe she liked playing house, too.
     
    Not that Maggie was what Caleb would call domestic. Regina reported she was almost useless in the